COPD dot COM
Development of an infrastructure for remotely supervised activity monitoring of COPD patients and a portal for inter-professional and-patient communication.

Apart from smoking cessation and pharmacotherapy, non- pharmacotherapeutical interventions including diet and nutrition, an active life style and reactivation or pulmonary rehabilitation are important for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Current care however, is felt suboptimal. Two of the key problems are:

1. Lack of insight in the real daily activities of patients and by this lack of insight in the impact of physical training on disease status and condition. This is highly relevant as the key element in disease management is to teach the patient adequate coping strategies with respect to his disease status, condition and daily activity pattern.
2. In chronic care settings, as is in COPD, integration of services beyond organizational borders is essential. This requiring adequate cross-organizational communication amongst involved members. In the COPD patients experience lack of inter-professional communication, necessitating them to act as care coordinator/indirect messenger between professionals.

Based on their experience, partners in this project share the vision that care for the patients with COPD can be more efficient and effective when supporting this care by ICT. More specifically, it is expected that monitoring of the disease status at home with adequate communication and information sharing about the gathered data will increase the effectiveness and efficiency of care of patients with COPD.

To realize this, the project focuses on:

1. Developing an ICT infrastructure that enables gathering and secure transport of information about the daily activity patterns and physical condition of COPD patients.
2. Developing a web based portal that creates the possibility to realize remotely supervised training and monitoring of disease status in the daily environment as well as to communicate and share this and other relevant medical (e.g. lung function parameters, heart rate, breathing frequency) information with other care professionals and the patient.

Partners involved are .

Project partners within this consortium are Medisch Spectrum Twente, Novay, University of Twente (CTIT), IZIT and RRD

The project is funded by

ICT en Disease Management program of ZonMw

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